Confronting Economic and Social Realities, 1980–1999 201
DOCUMENT 150: Jeremy Rifkin on Biotechnology and the
Environment (1998)Jeremy Rifkin, the president of the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation on Economic Trends, is an economist
and political advisor who writes about developments in science and technology and their influence on economic
and social trends. His book The Biotech Century explores some of the possible effects on the environment of
manipulating nature to produce overnight the kinds of changes that in the past required tens of thousands of years.While the biotech revolution will reshape
the global economy and remake our society, it
is likely to have an equally significant impact
on the Earth’s environment. The new technol-
ogies of the Genetic Age allow scientists, cor-
porations, and governments to manipulate the
natural world at the most fundamental level—
the genetic components that help orchestrate
the developmental processes in all forms of
life. In this regard, it is probably not overstat-
ing the case to suggest that the growing arsenal
of biotechnologies is providing us with power-
ful new tools to engage in what will surely be
the most radical experiment on the Earth’s life
forms and ecosystems in history. Imagine the
wholesale transfer of genes between totally
unrelated species and across all biological
boundaries—plant, animal and human—cre-
ating thousands of novel life forms in a brief
moment of evolutionary time. Then, with
clonal propagation, mass-producing count-
less replicas of these new creations, releasing
them into the biosphere to propagate, mutate,
proliferate, and migrate, colonizing the land,
water, and air.
Genetically engineered organisms differ
from petrochemical products in several impor-
tant ways. Because they are alive, genetically
engineered organisms are inherently more
unpredictable than petrochemicals in the way
they interact with other living things in the envi-
ronment. Consequently, it is much more diffi-
cult to assess all of the potential impacts that a
genetically engineered organism might have on
the Earth’s ecosystems.
Genetically engineered products also repro-
duce. They grow and they migrate. Unlike many
petrochemical products, it is difficult to con-
strain them within a given geographical locale.
Once released, it is virtually impossible to recall
genetically engineered organisms back to the
laboratory, especially those organisms that are
microscopic in nature. For all these reasons,
genetically engineered organisms may pose far
greater long-term potential risks to the environ-
ment than petrochemicals.
The risks in releasing novel genetically engi-
neered organisms into the biosphere are similar
to those we’ve encountered in introducing exotic
organisms into the North American habitat. Over
the past several hundred years, thousands of non-
native organisms have been brought to America
from other regions of the world. While many of
these organisms have adapted to the North Ameri-
can ecosystems without severe dislocations, a
small percentage of them have run wild, wreak-
ing havoc on the flora and fauna of the continent.
Gypsy moth, Kudzu vine, Dutch elm disease, chest-
nut blight, starlings, and Mediterranean fruit flies
come easily to mind.... Each year the American
continent is ravaged by these non-native organ-
isms, with destruction to plant and animal life run-
ning into the billions of dollars.
Whenever a genetically engineered organism
is released, there is always a small chance that it
too will run amok because, like non-indigenous
species, it has been artificially introduced into a
complex environment that has developed a web
of highly integrated relationships over long peri-
ods of evolutionary history. Each new synthetic
introduction is tantamount to playing ecologi-
cal roulette. That is, while there is only a small